


Little Things

by amazinmango



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, PB&J sammiches, buttons, not the sammich, sammy makes cas a sammich, semi-explicit but not really?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 14:35:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16019951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amazinmango/pseuds/amazinmango
Summary: Castiel is no longer an immense entity of light and power; he's losing himself, but he's also learning what it means to know the little things, and maybe to be one of them.





	Little Things

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [DeanCas Smol Things Challenge](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/allthesmolthings2018) :D

**BUTTON**

Castiel frowns.

It’s a small thing, a round object gently silhouetted against the surface of the map room table.

It’s tan, resting just against the lines humans use to represent the coordinate plane, somewhere near modern Guam, itself a tiny territory of small islands in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet.

It’s a sign.

Light shows through the four small holes at its center, and it’s a visible, painful reminder of what little grace he has left, unable to maintain the few millimeters of thread that hold the button to his coat.

He’s fading; a celestial being of formerly immense size, ribbons of wavelength wrapped inside a bundle of skin, muscle and bone, human.

 

**ACHE**

The sound is loud, in the cramped space of the kitchen.

The kitchen isn’t small, not really. In fact, the bunker has been feeling larger, because it’s his body that feels smaller every day.

It isn’t that _he_ feels small _inside_ his body; he is becoming his body. He’s becoming smaller.

His body is _becoming_ again, remembering things like fatigue, and the pain of hunger.

His stomach grumbles again.

He holds his palm to his belly, frowning down at it. The clinking of a knife against a plate reminds him that he can do this himself, but it’s Sam that holds the plate out to him, presents him with a tiny gesture that carries much weight.

Two pieces of bread held together with peanut butter and jelly, familiar and newly foreign.

Flavor explodes across his tongue.

He makes another sound, and inexplicably there’s a strange burn in his nose, a sting beginning at the inner corners of his eyes. He blinks and inhales around the bite; across the table, leaning against the counter, Sam gives him a gentle smile.

 

**TOUCH**

Castiel looks at his own eyes in the mirror.

The image of his face is rendered via signals processed by the brain inside his skull, interpreted from the miniscule rods and cones that lay against the retinas of his eyes. Wavelengths of light bounced off mundane things like skin and hair but now _seen,_ now _felt_ in a way he hasn’t in a long time.

Castiel feels languid and yet so _alive,_ in this moment.

Dark hair, lank with sweat, falls over the skin of his forehead. His own mouth is open, lips parted against his slowing breaths; he can see them move.

The edge of the counter under his hands is hard and cold, and he can feel sweat under his palms.

The air is still humid from the shower and weighted over his skin, beads on his chest and shoulders. His muscles are still lax from the glorious pounding of the water, and from the efforts of the large, heavy presence behind him. A familiar one, always welcome, even in this way that is yet novel.

Dean’s body vibrates with a thousand tiny things; his own muscles, spent and twitching gently against Castiel’s skin. His breaths, in and out, sweeping over his shoulder. The minute motions of him, within Castiel, _inside;_ the beat of his heart, or perhaps Castiel’s, between them in this tight, intimate space. Hot and slick, getting slicker.

The trembling of his large hand, spread over Castiel’s right side low, tiny little _pat pat pats_ against the bone.

His nerves _sing._

He pushes his hips back, just enough; Dean sighs against his shoulder.

 

**LICK**

Everything is becoming magnified, becoming—more. Dean’s hand is large and dry, but he’s not stroking; he’s pulled the skin back, just enough, exposing this tiny spot underneath that has the power to make Castiel lose control, unable to stop the reactions of his human body, building, rolling, inevitable.

Dean’s closed his lips around it, this little spot, and they’re soft, so soft. His other hand is warm against the inside of his thigh; he suckles. Dean’s tongue makes tiny taps and touches that are more than enough; for all that they’re minute, it’s overwhelming.

He means to warn Dean, he really does. Dean’s indignant yell as he shoves off the bed and dashes to the small sink in the room is loud, hand swiping at his cheek under a hastily-shut eye.

A little pull, an insistent tugging at the corner of Castiel’s mouth, familiar and just as new, just as inevitable: he lets himself have the tiny smile, listening to the sound of grumbling muffled by running water.

 

**LIGHT**

The bed is just big enough for this.

Dean’s knees are bent at the edges of the mattress, and he’s been pulling the comforter into fierce creases under his hands. The skin over his knuckles is white and red.

The hairs on the inside of his thighs is thinner, smaller and softer than on the outside. His skin too is softer here.

He’s heavy in Castiel’s mouth, and again he can feel heartbeat, such a base sign of vitality experienced in such a visceral way as Castiel hasn’t before.

The way Dean shakes under him, open and trusting and restrained, held between his lips and the mercy of his human touch. The last time Castiel felt power like this he’d been the manifestation of heavenly wrath, blinding and magnificent.

He licks the hot, salty skin under his tongue and remembers oily flames, flickering at his wings, jealous and icy claws reaching.

He inhales; Dean’s scent is stronger, here. He remembers his own singed feathers, acrid and immediate.

Dean’s breath stutters in his ears. He remembers the cries of fear and anger in a place manifested entirely of both.

As Dean’s flesh moves in his mouth, he remembers the pain he felt in his very core, grace touched by the infernal, the impure. He remembers what it felt to be an angel forty years deep in the pit, the sound and sight and scent suppressed to the bottom of his consciousness, for all his strength and power was unimportant for the weight of the frail thing in his grasp.

He strokes a hand along Dean’s thigh, thick and solid. He remembers the bony shoulder under his palm, a human body that wasn’t a body, a representation of everything he’d fought so hard to reach.

There’s sweat under his fingers and they clench, a little, putting small indentations in the muscle. He remembers skin that wasn’t skin, covered in blood and ichor.

He squeezes and moves his head; Dean groans. He remembers muscle that wasn’t, stretched over bones that weren’t, broken and reformed and broken again.

Dean writhes under him, trying so hard not to move, and he remembers what he had looked like, given strength anew when he had turned the knife instead.

Dean’s head is bent an an awkward angle, his expression bewildered and open and vulnerable. Castiel remembers his eyes, as he’d turned his head over his shoulder and beheld his savoir, brows moving together in suspicion. Castiel remembers as the flames and the damned screamed around them both his singular focus had wavered.

Castiel had been blooded and marked, and he’d stood strong with his wings held high, washing out the lurid surroundings with his own blue-white glow…and yet.

He’d been unprepared—not for Hell, but for the beacon at its center. For the light shining under the grime and blood, shining so bright it shone through the corruption that Hell had tried so hard to weave into it, over it but never, never through.

In the face of that light, Castiel had truly felt small.

Dean is under him now, panting and shaking and trusting. His eyes are green and bright and Dean stares like he doesn’t quite understand what he’s seeing. The last time Castiel had felt this, he’d held Dean’s soul in his hands.

Castiel meets his gaze as he moves, pulls back just a little so he can move his other hand. He cups him now, shifts his palm, rolls his knuckles underneath so he can stroke the pad of his thumb down, lower.

It’s a simple thing to grasp something that’s both conscious control and perhaps a tiny shred of grace, to slide his lips lower still, to suppress the instinct of his throat to close.

Dean’s breath catches and Castiel breathes through his nose against his skin until he stops too, and his thumb finds the small bit of muscle at Dean’s center and presses. Just a little, just enough, and Dean breaks.

Taste, sound, warmth, motion; it crashes over Castiel in a wave. He feels very small indeed, in the presence of so much. Castiel takes him all in, feels as though he’s soaking up Dean’s essence through his skin.

He closes his eyes and is subsumed.

 

**BREATH**

Glimpsed through the little crack in the door, a big frame sprawls across a bed that looks a shade too small.

A lot of things look too small, with Sam. Cups, paperback books, phones (though those do seem to continually grow inexplicably larger, Castiel has noticed). Sometimes clothes, the ones Sam calls his “lazy” ones, sweatpants with cuffs riding high at the ankle though they’re too wide at the waist.

Castiel doesn’t mean to go into the room. He never does. But he finds himself standing by the bed, listening to the air pass in and out of Sam’s lungs, tilting his head though he can no longer hear the beat of his heart from this distance, know that the blood rushes through his body, carrying and sustaining life.

His hair is spread over the pillow, one hand tucked underneath. He’s only partway under the covers, a socked foot sticking out. He makes a sleepy inquiry when he opens his eyes enough to see Castiel there; it’s perhaps a sign.

Not so much that he’s growing used to finding the former angel standing over him, because he still startles sometimes, says things like “you’re weird” and “can you please not do that” and “yes, Cas, I’m okay, really,” but he’s never really told Castiel to _stop,_ per se. Castiel thinks he understands, because he’s started asking if _Castiel_ is okay, and Castiel finally sits down one night in the chair by the bed (Sam does look a little consternated at this) and tells Sam he’s been having bad dreams.

Sam’s eyebrows shift, and his face changes as he listens. Castiel can’t see the minute electrical impulses that run legion under his skin, can’t follow the impulses that begin at his brain and travel to his extremities. He can’t _see_ these things anymore that show Sam’s human body is alive and vital. He has to hear him breathing, to know that he—that he’s still here, still okay.

He can’t see the light of his soul, not like he used to, but he’s learning, now. He sees it in little things, certain sounds or touches or gestures.

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich in late afternoon. An invitation to binge on Netflix between hunts.

The way he listens, despite the fact that it’s well past midnight. Sam listens, his eyes earnest and gentle, and Castiel doesn’t know why his voice trembles, why it sounds so quiet, or why some words seem to spill out of him, but Sam listens all the same.

The way Sam reaches one of his long arms and rests his hand on Castiel’s forearm when the words run out, and tells him it’s okay. He tells him it’s okay to have bad dreams, and that they sometimes go away and they sometimes don’t, but that he’ll be here if Castiel needs him, any hour. He tells him to talk to Dean too, if he wants, and to try to get some sleep.

Dean is in his room, across the bed also, but mostly to one side. An arm is flung outward into a space that is obvious for its emptiness. The memory foam has long since risen, but the sheets show the shape of someone not there.

Castiel can’t see in the dark, but the floor lights in the hall are enough; perhaps some of his human senses are yet a little better, a little enhanced. Rods and cones, wavelengths; something of his former self.

On the nightstand next to a picture of a small Dean and his mother is a small round button. Castiel isn’t the one who put it there.

He carefully climbs into the bed, tries to get under the covers without making too much fuss, but the flung-out arm finds him anyway, and Dean mumbles something about wandering angels before pulling him in and fluffing the sheets over them both, wrapping him up and pulling him close.

He’s warm, he’s big, and he’s alive. His heart beats against Castiel’s skin, and Castiel listens to him breathe.

Castiel listens to Dean breathe, and he knows that he is okay. He knows that he is welcomed, that he is loved.

He knows that _he_ is alive, and here, now. At home.

It’s a small thing, but it’s enough.

Castiel closes his eyes, and lets himself fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I almost posted this with the scene "LIGHT" with its placeholder title, "BUTT STUFF."


End file.
